This little book is cordially recommended to all parties just hesitating on the plush-padded, gilt-edged threshold of our highest social circles.

In purely business affairs, it may not be as useful as Hoyle’s Games, or Locke on the Human Understanding, but a careful study of its contents cannot but prove the “Open Sesame” to that jealously-guarded realm,—good society,—in which you aspire to circulate freely and shine with becoming luster.

“It is easier for a needle to pass through a camel’s eye,” says Poor Richard, or some one else, “than for a poor young man to enter the mansions of the rich.” And I, the author of this code of warnings, as truly say unto you, that a contemptuous disregard of the same will be likely to lead you into mortification and embarrassment, if not into being incontinently kicked out of doors.

While intended chiefly for the young, not the less may the old, the decrepit, and the infirm like-wise rejoice in the possession of the rules and prohibitions herein contained, and hasten to commit them to memory.

But the memory is treacherous.

It would, therefore, be well for such persons to carry the Hand Book constantly with them, to be referred to on short notice wherever they may chance to be—in the street-car, in the drawing-room, on the promenade, on the ball-room floor, at table, while visiting, and so on.

In this way the Hand Book will be like the magic ring that pricked the wearer’s finger warningly whenever about to yield to an unworthy impulse. Its instructively reiterated “Never” will become, indeed, a blessing—not in disguise, but rather in guardian angel’s habiliments.

It will be, in truth, a bosom companion in the happiest sense of the term, a mutely eloquent monitor of deportment, a still, small voice as to what is in good form and what is not.